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Ruth King

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Their Time Is Up The murder of the Bibas children caps off an 18-month catalog of horrors that has told us eexactly who our Palestinian neighbors are. Backed by a friend in the White House, Israel must secure its future through strong unilateral action. Liel Leibovitz

By on February 21st, 2025

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/bibas-children-israel-gaza

Grief means little. Rage matters even less. All that we have now are the cold, unfeeling facts: Kfir Bibas, the baby smiling sweetly at us in the photograph, holding his pink elephant, was taken violently from his home, together with his mother Shiri and his four-year-old brother, Ariel. They were held in Gaza and eventually murdered. We may never know the details of their ordeal, but we know plenty about their tormentors. For nearly eighteen months, we’ve been collecting forensic evidence about the specimens who live in Gaza. What do we know about them? The question matters. A lot. In fact, no other does, particularly as Israel and the United States are trying to ascertain how to proceed now that the first round of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas is nearing its end.

What do we know, then?

We know the numbers: A large-scale survey of Gazans, conducted by researchers from Oxford University and published in Foreign Affairs just last week, showed that whereas only 36% of Gazans supported Hamas prior to October 7, 2023, the number spiked to well over a half in March 2024, and began to decline only when Israel successfully eliminated Yahya Sinwar in October of last year. Which should come as no surprise considering the fact that 98% of those surveyed described themselves as religious, and nearly as many said they saw the conflict with Israel in religious, not political terms: The Jews were usurpers who must be banished. How? When asked, 47% said they wanted to see Israel destroyed and replaced with a strict Islamic state governed by Sharia law, and 20% said they would settle merely for the forced removal of all Jews and their transfer to wherever it was their ancestors had lived prior to immigrating to Israel. The moderates, 17% of them, said they would be alright merely with embracing the Palestinian right of return, a kinder, gentler way to end the Jewish state.

Justice meant not only reversing Haman’s evil decree but forcing all those who were only too eager to partake in the slaughter to face the consequences of their actions.

And we know the stories: Many of the Israeli hostages who return tell variations of the same tale, of being held captive by ordinary families, abused and tormented not by bearded zealots with guns but by mothers and fathers and daughters and sons.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Temper Tantrums by Zelensky and European Leaders Could Scuttle Trump’s Ukraine Peace Efforts Trump’s push for Ukraine peace talks angers Zelensky and European leaders, who resist compromises and fear U.S.-Russia negotiations. By Fred Fleitz

By on February 21st, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/21/temper-tantrums-by-zelensky-and-european-leaders-could-scuttle-trumps-ukraine-peace-efforts/

You would think that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be extremely grateful to President Trump for his extraordinary full-court press to end the war in Ukraine. You might also assume that America’s European allies would appreciate that America now has a president who is reasserting strong American leadership on the international stage to promote peace in the Ukraine/Russia War, the Middle East, and around the world.

Over the last two weeks, Trump began an aggressive diplomatic effort to end the war in Ukraine. He enlisted his National Security Adviser, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Treasury, Russia/Ukraine special envoy, Middle East special envoy, and other officials to engage with Ukrainian, European, and Russian officials on how to end the war. Trump spoke on the phone with Putin and Zelensky. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff arranged the release of American prisoners from Russia, which hopefully was a sign of good faith by Putin in joining future peace talks.

This week, Secretary of State Rubio, National Security Adviser Waltz, and Witkoff held four hours of meetings in Riyadh with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Russian foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov. This meeting was intended to repair U.S.-Russian relations after years of neglect by the Biden administration and start a conversation with Russian officials on how to reach a cease-fire and a peace agreement in the Ukraine War.

Instead of promoting and supporting Trump’s peace efforts, European leaders and Zelensky threw temper tantrums. They have opposed everything Trump has tried to do, asserted that Trump is siding with Putin against Ukraine, and claimed they are being excluded from U.S. peace efforts.

European leaders, Zelensky, and the mainstream press have harshly attacked President Trump and his national security team for appeasing Putin, claiming that the U.S. talking with Russian officials rewards Russia by ending its isolation. This argument doesn’t make sense because it obviously is impossible to negotiate an end to the war without dialogue with Russia.

The real issue here is that Zelensky and European officials want to stick to the fantasy policy on the war they pursued with the Biden administration. This included no compromises whatsoever to Russia. Russia must withdraw from all Ukrainian territory. They want Russia to pay reparations to Ukraine and Russian officials to be tried for war crimes.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Insanity In Washington

By on February 21st, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/21/the-insanity-in-washington/

We’ve noted before that Democrats and progressives are, with some exceptions, of course, mentally imbalanced. What we’ve seen in the first month of the Trump administration, though, is appalling. The political left in this country needs an intervention before it goes completely mad.

We say this because:

New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer on Wednesday said – from the Senate floor – “At a time when incidents in the air and on the runways in and our airports seem to be increasing, why would we cut the very people meant to prevent them? Simple. Donald Trump and DOGE are doing it like they’re doing so much else, so they can help their billionaire buddies with another tax break.” This is so insane on its face that it needs no comment from us.
Rep. Robert Garcia, California Democrat, said, in reference to the Department of Government Efficiency that is eating away at the fourth, unelected but controlled by Democrats branch of government that the American people want “us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy, for the future of this country.”
Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas believes American voters are “callous & selfish” and a trifle too satanic for their support of DOGE’s work.
California Democrat Rep. Swalwell claims that “no president has had more planes crash in their first month in office than Donald Trump,” which might be true but there’s no reason to check because Swalwell’s comment is nonsensical. He should be embarrassed. In fact, as CNN just reported, “there was a record low number of airplane accidents nationwide” last month.
Margaret Brennan, a “journalist” at CBS and therefore a Democratic Party operative, apparently believes “free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide” by the Nazis. Surely nuttier things have been said on national television by network-paid political hacks, but it would be hard to find a better example of lunacy in the media. And, yes, CBS is the network that edited a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris last fall to help make her appear lucid and promoted the criminalization of censorship.
The same job description can be applied to Anne Applebaum, who, writing in the Atlantic, said “suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.” That’s right: When federal employees’ work product is being audited and their positions are determined to be unnecessary, they’re living under the boot of an invader. She believes that federal workers have been “under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations” – and that they actually did those things.
The Democrats’ communications department, known by some as the legacy media, has also implied that higher egg prices are Trump’s fault, with blanket coverage of an issue it largely ignored while prices were rising during the Biden years. “No Democrat has offered a coherent explanation of how anything Trump has done in the first month of his administration has had any effect on the price of eggs,” our friend Steven Hayward writes at Power Line. “In short, this is one of the dumbest and most contemptible political attacks of all time.” Which is what we’ve come to expect from a confederacy of the unhinged that has lost its ability to reason.
The Democrats elected a child to be their party’s vice chair. David Hogg might be 24-years-old, but he has the temperament of a toddler who has been told “no.” It’s hard not to picture him wearing one of those little boy suits that have shorts rather than trousers. While he is a successful – and shameless – self-promoter, he brings nothing but deranged, puerile anger. Which is probably why he was elected to that post.
And then there are the incessant chants, caterwauling and braying from the left that seems unable, and probably even unwilling, to stop its descent into madness.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Matti Friedman: The Family that Never Came Home

By on February 21st, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-the-bibas-shiri-kfir-ariel-yarden

The deaths of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas were too unbearable to believe. Israelis couldn’t accept it until we had no other choice.

Israeli television did not broadcast the ceremony that took place in Gaza this morning. As masked terrorists put four black coffins on a stage in Khan Younis, the channels instead showed photos of the people inside them, taken before the war began—including of an Israeli mother and two redheaded boys, laughing on a couch, picking fruit in an orchard, still believing they’re safe.

Shiri Bibas was seized from her home on October 7, 2023, along with her children Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months. Their remains were returned to Israel after 10 a.m. local time. With them was the body of Oded Lifshitz, a grandfather, journalist, and peace activist who was 83 when he was kidnapped from the same kibbutz, Nir Oz.

For Israelis, October 7 is a slow-release catastrophe. Hamas has bargained not just over every Israeli hostage and corpse, but also over scraps of information about their fate, meaning that the precise death toll from the war’s first day is still not clear. Some of those we hoped were still alive turn out to have been dead from the very beginning—like Shlomo Mantzour, a grandfather taken at age 85 and thought to be the oldest Israeli hostage until last week, when new information revealed he was killed 16 months ago.

No captives have focused public sentiment like the Bibas children, the youngest Israeli hostages. Footage from October 7 showed a terrified Shiri Bibas cradling a baby and a toddler as they were taken at gunpoint from their home. The two redheads quickly became symbols of the 250 Israelis taken hostage—icons not just of the inhumanity of the Palestinians who kidnapped and murdered civilians and celebrated this barbarism as a victory, but of the unthinkable weakness of the Israeli state that allowed this to happen.

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HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The shadow of history Both the Nazis and Hamas called for the murder of innocent Jewish children.Fiamma Nirenstein

By on February 21st, 2025

https://www.jns.org/the-shadow-of-history/

On Oct. 6, 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered a chilling speech to Nazi leaders justifying the murder of Jewish children. Eighty years later, on Oct. 6, 2023, Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar reportedly issued a similarly horrific order to his followers—not only to kill Jewish children but to kidnap them. This stark parallel underscores the persistent and brutal nature of antisemitic violence, revealing its continued threat in the modern era.

In his speech, Himmler rationalized the mass murder of Jewish families, stating: “I would not consider myself justified if I killed the adults … and then allowed their children to grow up and seek revenge against our own children and grandchildren. We have therefore decided to make this people disappear from the face of the earth.”

This ideology led to the systematic murder of 1.5 million Jewish children during World War II and the Holocaust, many slaughtered in their mothers’ arms or subjected to brutal conditions in concentration and death camps. The echoes of this horror resonate today as Hamas targets Jewish children in its acts of terror. During the attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israeli communities, burning families alive, mutilating victims and abducting children, the youngest a 9-month-old baby. These actions were driven by religious hatred, not strategic warfare.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

On the Road to Bulawayo Robert M Kaplan

By on February 20th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/africa/on-the-road-to-bulawayo/

In 1980 Bulawayo was the pearl of Rhodesia. Beautifully maintained, it was well laid out with attractive gardens, public spaces, excellent utilities and competently functioning services. Former residents speak nostalgically of their happy memories.

Try it now (above). Berlin 1945 is not too much of an exaggeration. Buildings are crumbling, closed and shuttered ruins, exuding an air of emptiness, desolation and gloom. The railway station is permanently closed. Giant potholes making the road look like the surface of the moon ensure travel over 20kms is impossible. There are no shoulders and cars just cruise on regardless through the unsigned intersections. Alongside the road sit or lie listless ghost people with pathetic displays of goods. The museum, formerly one of the best in Africa, now has dusty untended cabinets mostly invisible due to the theft of light bulbs.

It is a picture of utter dystopia, African style. In one of the worst examples of vicious irony, a statue of Joshua Nkomo, the leader of ZAPU, has displaced Cecil Rhodes – no doubt intended as a reminder to the locals of the near-genocide of Nkomo’s followers by Mugabe’s North Korean thugs should they have any ideas about protesting their fate.

What produces this oasis of desolation and despair, no different to the state of the rest of Zimbabwe? Forty-five years of rule by ZANU, that’s what, a depressing rebuttal to Ian Smith’s comment that had Rhodesia Front been left to gradually bring in full voting while retaining white expertise and institutional memory there would have been a far superior outcome.

What does this tell us? Every independence or liberation party in Southern Africa, if not the rest of Africa, once in power has held on regardless, running their economies into the ground and producing desolation, poverty and misery for their people that dwarfs anything they experienced in the colonial days. Look at Mozambique, Angola, Namibia where the governing parties have held on, going to any lengths to ensure that no democratic process can evict them, regardless of the desire of the suffering population.

It is not difficult to find how this comes about. These parties are run by unreconstructed Stalinists, hardwired with the National Democratic(!) Revolution ideology. This template is the map for centralising all state institutions, stripping away democratic rights and crushing all opposition to create a one-party state. The results are predictable and appalling. The mass of the population are driven into severe poverty, infrastructure is ruined, the remaining middle class is crushed while the party and its acolytes become enormously richer, stripping the country of every resource they can lay their hands on. It is kleptocracy that dwarfs countries like Nigeria, even Russia.

Consider Zimbabwe. Infrastructure gone, farming ruined – the former breadbasket of Africa now has to import food – and fully one-third of the population has fled to other countries. Mozambique is no better. The government has ruthlessly suppressed all protest after an election it lost. Such is the desolation and poverty that an ISIS group has invaded the oil-rich north, where they have no difficulty finding supporters among the wretched population.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Sometimes, Moral Clarity Isn’t Difficult Ben Shapiro

By on February 20th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/benshapiro/2025/02/19/sometimes-moral-clarity-isnt-difficult-n4937126

This week, the world was reminded of the deep and abiding evil that has wormed its way to the center of Palestinian nationalistic culture by the news that the Bibas family — a mother, Shiri; a 4-year-old boy, Ariel; and his 9-month-old brother, Kfir — who had been kidnapped back to Gaza on Oct. 7 had in fact been murdered. Their bodies are to be returned to Israel this week; Hamas held the corpses hostage, and in return received the release of imprisoned Palestinian terrorists.

It is instructive to recall the circumstances of the Bibas family’s kidnapping. They were not, in fact, kidnapped by identified members of Hamas. They were kidnapped by Palestinians in civilian dress, who joined Hamas for their murderous spree. For over a year, zero Palestinians apparently revealed the whereabouts of the Bibas family to the Israelis; zero worked to keep them safe or to restore them to liberty.

This fits with a pattern of civilian involvement in Palestinian terror activity: the reality is that the Palestinian terror apparatus is incestuously intertwined with the Palestinian civilian population. That is why released hostages tell of being held by civilian families in Gaza; why terrorists merge so easily into the surrounding civilian population; why the popularity of Palestinian terrorist groups remains sky-high among Palestinians generally. The hard division between terrorist and civilian so cherished by the West simply doesn’t exist in practice in places like the Gaza Strip.

None of this is meant to alleviate the moral responsibility to attempt to distinguish between terror and civilian targets — a task Israel has accepted with more success than any country in the history of warfare, achieving a nearly 1:1 terrorist-to-civilian-death ratio in the heavily urban Gaza Strip. But it is vital to recognize that the Palestinian nationalist cause is itself honeycombed with cancer: that it is rooted not in a desire for an independent state to exist side-by-side by Israel, as the mythical two-state solution has now suggested for decades, but in a desire for the complete extirpation of Jewish life in the Middle East.

Again, Palestinian civilians kidnapped and held babies. They then held their corpses hostage to achieve the release of murderous Palestinian terrorists.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

House Oversight Investigating Underreported Foreign Funding at American Universities By Brittany Bernstein

By on February 20th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-oversight-investigating-underreported-foreign-funding-at-american-universities/

The House Oversight Committee is seeking information from the Department of Education about foreign funding for U.S. colleges and universities as the committee looks to dig into an investigation that had been throttled by the Biden administration.

In a letter to acting Department of Education Secretary Denise Carter obtained exclusively by National Review, committee chairman James Comer and Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) note foreign nations have given more than $57 billion to U.S. institutions since 1981 and voice concern that many institutions have failed to make disclosures for funds received under the Biden administration.

Comer and Foxx accuse the Biden administration of having “rolled back investigations into foreign funding in academia that took place in the first Trump Administration.” 

The committee is now requesting documents and information regarding the department’s enforcement of reporting requirements; Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires institutions that receive federal financial assistance to biannually file disclosure reports with the Secretary of Education. These reports must disclose “gifts received or contracts executed with a foreign source, valued at $250,000 or more, or if an institution is owned or controlled by a foreign source.”

Just 5 percent of U.S. institutions self-report foreign funding, the letter says. The Department of Education’s Office of the General Counsel wrote in 2020 that “there is very real reason for concern that foreign money buys influence or control over teaching and research.”

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

JAMA Article Promotes “Neurodiversity” in Medical School By Wesley J. Smith

By on February 20th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/jama-article-promotes-neurodiversity-in-medical-school/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

This is a delicate matter, but I think it must be confronted. The Journal of the American Medical Association has published an article that urges “neurodiversity” be given “holistic” consideration when accepting students into medical school in keeping with diversity goals. From “Embracing Neurodiversity in Medicine — Building a More Inclusive Physician Workforce:”

The benefits of diversity have long been recognized with respect to persons with minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds, women, persons who are LGBTQ+, and others, and there has been a wide range of efforts to increase the representation of these individuals among physicians. Currently, however, these same programs and institutions do not similarly prioritize neurodiversity, the range of developmental neurocognitive differences that underlie individual variation in thinking, learning, and behavior.

What conditions are we discussing?

The term neurodiversity broadly describes the breadth of neurocognitive variation in a group or population, similar to variation along any other axis of diversity. However, in an organizational context, it frequently refers to the inclusion of minoritized “neurodivergent” individuals who identify as having 1 of a range of neurodevelopmental conditions (eg, autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD], Tourette syndrome, learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dyscalculia).

This idea seems particularly perilous. Obviously, if someone with a neurodiverse condition has the ability to enter medical school and eventually practice medicine, he or she should not be discriminated against. But because the responsibilities of doctors are so profound, acceptance must not be based on adjusted or “holistic” considerations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tom Hanks, Margaret Brennan, and the European Ministers—Reveal It All SNL, Margaret Brennan, and EU elites mock Trump supporters, yet their own cluelessness only fuels the populist rise they fear. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 20th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/20/tom-hanks-margaret-brennan-and-the-european-ministers-reveal-it-all/

Three recent but completely unrelated events illustrate the deranged hatred of Donald Trump and his supporters continuing now even into a second decade. And yet the venom only further marginalizes the left.

In its too-long 50th anniversary spectacle, Saturday Night Live offered a skit in which marquee actor Tom Hanks did an impression of what the left thinks is a supposedly neanderthal Trump supporter.

The episode was NBC’s tele-version of the recent Obama-Hillary Clinton-Biden vocabulary of cheap MAGA disparagement: clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs, semi-fascists, and ultra-MAGAs.

Most of those stereotyped props were evident in Hanks’ character.

He was wearing a red MAGA hat (real and not the fake versions of Jussie Smollett’s wild and sinister imagination).

Hanks sounded off as a superstitious evangelical, a slow-speaking Southern twanger, and a poorly dressed slob.

And of course, the SNL writers insisted that he play the gratuitous racist. So, Hanks, as a clueless Black Jeopardy contestant, initially refused to even shake the hand of the African-American, assumed intellectually and morally superior, gameshow host.

We are supposed to believe the Hanks caricature is in contrast with progressives—usually represented in society as the bicoastal enlightened, well-spoken, and snappily dressed.

Perhaps the SNL crowd thought the counterpart to Hanks’ MAGA sluggard was the recent hard-left, Democratic standard-bearer—the eloquent Kamala Harris of mesmerizing word-salad fame?

Aside from the reality that Trump captured a record number of African-American male voters, nearly split the Hispanic vote, and made gains with Asian- and Jewish-Americans, he also won massive defections from Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

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